


Coconut Water

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Briefly mentioned background ships includ:, Flushed RoseMary, Gen, and flushed Katnep, pitch JadeNep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 03:59:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1495789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are thirteen bloods, each with different flavours. You do not tire of drinking the same one, day after day, as you used to tire of eating the same meals Before. But you have partaken of them all, some moreso than others. All often enough to recognize the scents, and the friends who have donated them to you.</p><p>This smells… white. White and sweet, like sugared tea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coconut Water

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Coconut Water Can Be Used For Blood Transfusions](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/45841) by Tumblr user Darkwater-Smidge. 



Your name is Kanaya Maryam, and when you love things, you love them as fiercely as any mother. 

In this case, however, the hot press of the sun against your ethereal skin is not the sort of thing that requires bloodthirsty defense and vicious retribution, or sweet attempts at guile that stutter into stupidity with an unfortunate speed.

You adore the sun because it has ever been the marker of the role you were meant to play. Even among humanity, its light can be cruel, though not quite murderous. Dave, with his pink-white skin and trollishly sensitive eyes, is proof enough of that.

But, though your skin is thinner and paler- apparently a marker of sun sensitivity in humans, always indignantly backwards- you do not burn. Instead, you bake. You can feel the thrum of the heat down into your bones, richly suffusing you with an incandescence that sings to your latent instincts as a daywalker. 

It layers over you like a blanket, and you indulge in the sensation.

Before, when you laid in the sun too long, you could feel a rhythm to it. Your own blood, beneath your skin, vessels dilating in the warmth until your pusher was a rippling drum, and your pulse marked the passage of time. 

You are dead, now, and have no such primitive metronomes. But your hypersensitive eyes mark the time now, gauging the movement of shadows behind the jade green blindfold of your eyelids.

The gritty shift of grains of sand beneath sandalled feet catches your attention, but you do not want to move. Peeling open an eye seems such a dire hassle.

The salt-soaked breeze carries on it a rich bouquet of scents, however. There is sweat- another oddity of biology that you no longer possess- and there are colors. Sweet cinnamon candies for humans, who all smell much the same to your predatory senses, as well as the violent cherry liqueur tang that marks your moirail’s mutation, and the sweet, grass scent of his matesprit.

And something else. Something that sets your fangs edging into the soft meat inside your lip with a sudden, ravenous thirst. Alive, you are not, but the correlation between heat and desanguination seems much the same as that between summer and dehydration. 

It is the curiosity that ultimately sways you into motion. Partly, you wonder which of the humans it is- not Dave, and Rose is just as unlikely though for different reasons. But far more importantly, there is a new smell.

There are thirteen bloods, each with different flavours. You do not tire of drinking the same one, day after day, as you used to tire of eating the same meals Before. But you have partaken of them all, some moreso than others. All often enough to recognize the scents, and the friends who have donated them to you.

This smells… white. White and sweet, like sugared tea. And rich, like butter on fresh toast. Almost burnt, almost caramel, and yet, when you peel your eye open, letting it roll at an unnatural angle to pinpoint the source, you do not discover some strange lusus or a new breed of human, or a troll wriggler with a new mutation. You find a can.

It is one of six, the other five hanging by an empty plastic ring from Jade’s finger. You can tell that the weight of them is cutting off her circulation, but she clearly doesn’t notice.

It is a blue can with green text printed between two gaping halves of a split open fantree fruit.

Confusion starts to replace the curiosity.

Much like you had tried drinking blood Before, you had tried eating food After.

It wasn’t toxic, but it was unpleasantly like trying to eat springy, starchy dirt. The flavours and scents were simply not appealing.

But whatever was in that can…

Tuned in to it now, you can hear it sloshing beneath the idle chatter of the approaching trio. It sounds like water, thin and splashy, not slow with hæmochrome and plasma.

"Kanaya, if you don’t stop staring like that, I’m not going to be the one who explains it to Rose for you." Karkat’s voice is gravelly and rich with disapproval. He so rarely gets the chance to reprimand your behaviour, though, and you can hear the way his M’s don’t quite seal. You don’t have to look to know he’s smirking. You don’t want to look.

The parts of you that are the hardest to control, the hungry, rangy need to hunt and swallow, are acting up terribly. The soothing weight of the soft white radiation of this human sun is forgotten.

Whatever is in that can, you are going to have it.

"Uhhh, are you okay?" Jade asks as you roll into a low crouch. You try to force your shoulders to loosen, or at least your claws, but it doesn’t work quite like it should.

This is new, and new thirsts are vicious and desperate.

"Well that’s a stupid question," Nepeta pipes up, glaring at Jade with only the purest kismetic condescension. 

You would, under other circumstances, naturally take note of such a thing, your well refined nose for auxiliation seeking out any hints of potentially unhealthy conflict. 

You are otherwise occupied by your sudden and inevitable shot from crouch to sprint, blitzing past the squabbling girls in a haze of vivid red sarong and kicked up sand. One of the sealed cans is rolling in your palm before you quite notice it.

In the space between sentences, you have already jammed the thin metal against your sharp and unforgiving teeth. You know, you  _know_ there is a tab for this express purpose. But your instincts beg you to tear open the throat of this new and succulent prey, and you do, the aluminum crunching easily, producing four evenly spaced pinpricks that your lips latch onto greedily.

It is sweet and savory, like oiled sunlight and brown buttered rice and what you imagine snow tastes like, though you have yet to actually see such a phenomenon. Rose says you’ll see it in a few perigrees.

If it is anything like this ridiculous concoction of canned fantree fruits, you think you will enjoy it.


End file.
